Horde3D

Hi,

I would like to use Horde as a renderer of static images.
I'm new to 3d and I guess this could be a nice start.

I would need to render the scene using soft shadows and full reflections, using if possible hardware acceleration.
Basically I would like to program a command line application the would work this way:

%> hordeRenderer scene_file output_image

My question is, is there a format understood by Horde that can describe an entire scene? once i've got my scene ready, how can I render it on an image file using Horde?
I would prefer not to have any windows open on the screen.


Thanks
Dan

Hi,

I would like to mention that Horde is a real-time renderer. You will get better results (image quality) if you used a ray-trace renderer like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YafRay this type of renderer produces much better quality images, specially in terms of reflections and shadows, there are many high quality algorithms that are not real time friendly.

There are many open source and commercial ray-trace renderers.

Eeeeeehhhhhhhh...

one by one:


That's doable. You could use more complicated shaders and pipelines.


You'd have to write shaders for soft shadows, you'd have to write shaders and C code for reflections. Of course it'd use hardware acceleration.

Commandline, no brainer.


Yeap, the scene.xml.


Render it to a buffer, grab the buffer, write to file.


Eeeehhh...not even for a preview? Sure you can do this, just never swap the buffers.


Horde isn't an offline renderer, so you can't expect to get super high-quality results without putting in a lot of work into pixel shaders and pipelines. You'll have to do your own global illumination, ambient occlusion, your own everything, in shaders and pipes.

But you can do it. I don't think it'd be a good project for someone starting in 3d though, but that's for you to decide.

EDIT: I just dug up GPU Gems 2 article "Implementing the Mental Images Phenomena Renderer on the GPU" they mention specifically that shader compilation of many heavy duty shaders can be of such significant overhead that software rendering is ideal, but that if shaders are already compiled, and textures fit in memory, it's fast as ... fast.

Thanks Acid.

My project started when I noticed that there were no fast open source and command line renderers around. I've tried blender, from command line, but it takes ages (~10 sec) to render even the simplest scene.
Well this is true to the best of my knowledge Do you guys know a renderer like I described?

Dan

I really do not get what you want to do

If you want to render an image using horde3D, use the editor to setup the scene and then do a simple print screen.

Pretty much hits it on the head, the more info you can give us about what it is you're doing the better we can help point you in the right direction.

ok i'll explain myself better. Modern graphic cards provide full hardware support for a vast variety of effects, for example the latest real time face rendering from Nvidia is just amazing.
I would like to implement a generic renderer that uses hardware acceleration to render the scene. No raytracing of course.
I would like to start small, maybe just implementing some effects like soft shadows, anti-aliasing and simple reflections.

And well, i've looked around and it doesn't seem that something like that (a fast, open source renderer) exists.
Do you know some other projects that are doing the same thing?
Most open source renderers i've found are specialized on ray tracing.


I hope my point is more clear now
thx

Wonderful.



That's completely do-able. Pretty much just look at everything in my previous post. I wouldn't worry about your requirement of being commandline and without a window until you get far enough along, as the constraint could slow you down quite a bit. You won't have the same rules or constraints to follow that we in real-time-world have so it may be difficult to get help on some things here and there.

There is nVidia's Gelato, but it isn't open source IIRC.

I've also found this list of open source renderers, googling

http://www.mega-tex.nl/links/rendersoftwarelinks.php

but most of them use ray tracing.

Well to begin with, I would like to strip down from HordeSceneEditor the part that loads a scene and simply output the result on a window (no GUI). Any idea about that?

thx

I would suggest to start parsing the scn file created by the editor and load the .scene.xml file referenced in it like it is done e.g. in the knight sample. Stipping down the loading from the editor is much more complicated.